"Sadly though, the material from the original film is scarce, being 3 prints from the Giger estate and 5 prints from the concept artist, Chris Foss. Photocopies of a French language magazine article are laid out in a side room."

I had very low expectations for this exhibition, but popped along cause it was a good excuse to write a piece about Jodorowsky (which I did here: http://tinyurl.com/jod-dune ).

In the end, though, I thought the new work was actually brilliant for the most part, way better than I'd anticipated. Vidya Gastaldon's series of drawings is superb, and so is Matthew Day Jackson's scultpure (or model - not really sure what you'd class it as) of a golden skeleton and set of mutating skulls. The best you could say about the other two artists' work is that it doesn't take up much room, but there you go.

When it comes to the original Jodo/Dune work, the Foss prints in particular look fantastic - internet and magazine reproductions don't do the colours justice. If you were after a thorough showcase for the Dune project you'd be disappointed, but then the exhibition has never been pitched as that.

It's pretty small, but free too - a welcome shot of colour on a Sunday afternoon, for me.

just reading an interview with a neo nazi (not sure why exactly) and came across this quote

One of the things that I most like about the neo-reactionaries is that they’ve learned a lesson that I learned years ago. For years, the most influential book on me was Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead, the most influential piece of fiction, but that changed, and eventually I realized that the piece of fiction that’s had the most influence on my thinking is Frank Herbert’s Dune.

The thing that fascinates me with Dune is its combination of futurism with archaic values and social forms which is basically what Guillaume Faye talks about in his book Archeofuturism as the way forward. We need to reinfuse modernity with certain things that are treated as archaic, and that means identity politics, an aristocratic ethos, a warrior ethos, and things that have been bred out of us by consumerism and bourgeois modernity.

So, Herbert basically applied himself to this question: what social form is consistent with mankind ascending to the stars and colonizing the galaxy? And it was very obvious to him that that was not consistent with democratic politics which has a very low time horizon. It requires grand politics, grand visions, a grand strategy stretching forward over generations, and we had that briefly under the pressure of the Cold War and because Kennedy was a visionary, but politics as usual took over. Space exploration has faltered, “because democracy.”

What you would need to reignite that is some kind of society like we had pre-modernity where we had aristocracies that thought in dynastic terms, where you had orders like the Catholic Church that thought in very long terms over time and perpetuated themselves over time.